Addictions & Answers: Can we ever win the war on drugs?
Friday, October 1st 2010, 4:00 AM
BILL: Dave, the first time I ever heard the phrase, "The War on Drugs" was back on Dragnet, when Jack Webb declared we were winning it. And now here's this new AP report that says "the rate of illegal drug use rose last year to the highest level in nearly a decade, fueled by a sharp increase in marijuana use and a surge in ecstasy and methamphetamine abuse, the government reported Wednesday."
DR DAVE: Gil Kerlikowske, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, called the 9% increase in drug use disappointing but said he was not surprised given "eroding attitudes" about the harm done by illegal drugs and the growing number of states approving medicinal marijuana.
BILL: Mike Meno, of the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, recently said, "It's time we stop this charade and implement sensible laws that would tax and regulate marijuana the same way we do more harmful - but legal - drugs like alcohol and tobacco." Since I don't think I took more than a half dozen puffs of marijuana in my life – it just left me cold – I got in touch with Mark A.R. Kleiman, a Professor of Policy Analysis at UCLA and author of "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment", about whether pot is indeed harmless.
He said: "If you take the people who've used pot as often as five times" - i.e., exclude people like you, Bill, who tried it and found it did nothing for them - "about 9% wind up as heavy daily users for an average of three and a half years each? That is not harmless. But 750,000 user arrests per year and 30,000 dealers behind bars? Too many. If grown-ups want to toke up, why not let them?"
DR. DAVE: He'd like to see pot made legal?
BILL: He says the danger is "the dealers would then try to create addicts, just like the brewers and the tobacco companies." What he proposes is to "allow people to grow their own pot or form consumer co-ops. No retailing, no billboards." My feeling is keeping pot illegal merely gives it glamour. Didn’t we learn anything from Prohibition?
DR DAVE: While in a recent survey, less than one-third of the California Society of Addiction Medicine's 400 physician members said they believed prison deters substance abuse, there are solutions other than jail on one side, and supermarket weekend Pot Sale Jamborees on the other.
Dr. David Moore is a licensed psychologist and chemical dependency professional who is a graduate school faculty member at Argosy University’s Seattle Campus. Bill Manville is a Book of the Month novelist; his most recent non-fiction work, "Cool, Hip & Sober," is available at online bookstores. He teaches "Writing To Get Published" for Temple University.
